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Continued from page 4

RQ: "Yes. It would provide enormous economic diversity and opportunity that doesn't exist now. Prosperity begins with small business, with committed, passionate people and communities and families that care about each other. And that's still intact up there. It's pretty amazing...I've organized rural America…before, in Guilford, where I started Burt's Bees, and I had up to about forty-five women and we got the business up to about $3 million in sales. It was like a sheer miracle."

MT: I am impressed by your tact; you’ve made very generous concessions to your opponents. It was reported in the that you would give “sportsmen” “30,000 acres north of Dover-Foxcroft to be managed like a state park, with hunting and snowmobiling allowed.” In light of your true diplomacy, not to mention your generosity, and the continued hassles of this proposed gesture on your part, does it give you some pause and worry about the future for American wilderness?

RQ: "I can preserve land, but I can't keep the trees alive if there's acid rain, or invasive caterpillars or other diseases caused by climate change. So, to me… it's the symbol of what one person can do to make a difference…to make the changes that we need to make so as to live on this earth in the future. I think it goes right back to unity… I don't mean to be apocalyptic about it – but I have always been a student of metaphysics and tried to sensitize myself to another dimension and get in touch with it and see if there's something to learn…one of the things I believe is that unless we unify our spirits on a completely global scale, we are just another failed experiment."

MT: I'm grateful – and I’m sure may others are, as well – that you're willing to express your opinions in this manner.

RQ: "The time that I spent living without electricity in the woods of Maine was really formative for me. It was so clear that I was not in charge, not for one minute… the humility factor – Mother Earth…. I think we need to have more opportunities to have humans interacting in Nature and feeling safe doing it. And I think national parks make it safe."

A bobcat prowls silently in the snow.

MT: I saw that picture of you atop Mount Katahdin. I gather your daughter took the photo?

RQ: "Yes. It was really huge for me because Thoreau didn't make it when he tried to get up that mountain. I was worried."

MT: Thoreau wrote, “This was the Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man’s garden, but the unhandselled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture… It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth…vast, terrific – not his Mother Earth that we have heard of, nor for him to tread on….”

RQ: "It's such a great passage. I just totally saw what he meant when I went up there. Why came you here before your time? The valleys and the lush forest saying, what are you doing here? It's just like that."